


soundtrack of my summer

by meios



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Body Shots, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mentions of Stiles' Mom, Mentions of cancer treatment, Switching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-08
Updated: 2013-06-08
Packaged: 2017-12-14 07:17:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/834198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meios/pseuds/meios
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It happens much like everything else happens: far too quickly and without a track to keep them grounded in, anchored; they are swallowing ocean water like gulps of air, and the salt that dries up their bellies is nothing like the open sea that surrounds them, agoraphobic.</p><p>And Stiles knows that this is probably a bad idea. He knows that the fingers ghosting over his too-short hair are only there because they have nothing else to hold onto, and he vaguely thinks of handlebars or deer antlers and the way they seem so easily graspable. He knows that with the kisses being all so violent, full of teeth clacking, black and ivory piano keys, that there is desperation hidden behind them all—there is something more akin to an animalistic need that is shared between the both of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	soundtrack of my summer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nashirah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nashirah/gifts), [whiskey_in_tea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskey_in_tea/gifts).



> In response to [this](http://lonewolfed.tumblr.com/post/52377439008/halffizzbin-ladyw1nter-cinematicnomad) gifset/prompt by [lonewolfed](http://lonewolfed.tumblr.com/)/[scoutsxhonor](http://scoutsxhonor.tumblr.com/)/[ladyw1nter](http://ladyw1nter.tumblr.com/), respectively.
> 
> The title is a line from the song _Thunder_ by Boys Like Girls: " _Your voice was the soundtrack of my summer. / Do you know you're unlike any other? / You'll always be my thunder._ "

It happens much like everything else happens: far too quickly and without a track to keep them grounded in, anchored; they are swallowing ocean water like gulps of air, and the salt that dries up their bellies is nothing like the open sea that surrounds them, agoraphobic.  
  
And Stiles knows that this is probably a bad idea. He knows that the fingers ghosting over his too-short hair are only there because they have nothing else to hold onto, and he vaguely thinks of handlebars or deer antlers and the way they seem so easily graspable. He knows that with the kisses being all so violent, full of teeth clacking, black and ivory piano keys, that there is desperation hidden behind them all—there is something more akin to an animalistic need that is shared between the both of them.  
  
He is pressed back into the messy array of papers spread out around his bed, head missing the pillows entirely, long limbs hanging off the edges for a moment before he has the mind to wrap them around the other body, legs around the waist, arms around the neck, hands buried in his hair. The middle of June brings open windows and cool breezes that predict rainfall in the coming days, the thick humidity of the atmosphere tangible and real enough to cut through with a knife, parting like Moses with the Red Sea.  
  
Gasping at teeth and tongue on his neck, though, Stiles’ spine arches, closing every semblance of distance between he and Derek. Their chests are one, their stomachs are seamless, and their hips meet and cause friction in ways that Stiles has only ever imagined. Derek laves at the area where his jaw meets his neck, sucks a mark there, high and difficult to cover up, and Stiles pushes down at the back of his head, urging him, encouraging him.  
  
He needs, he wants, he gives, he takes.  
  
And he says, breathless, choking on a laugh, after Derek has opened him up with thick, sticky fingers that match the thick, sticky night, after Stiles’ toes had learned to curl in such a way that he is surprised that they are not broken, after the aforementioned fingers, slicked with lubricant, had wrapped around him and split him down the middle, heated and relentless and unmerciful, “I think we ruined half the papers we printed out.”  
  
Derek does not smile; there is only a hum. His face is tucked into the hollow of Stiles’ neck, every exhalation that he finds himself making hot on the boy’s skin, but he seems incapable of pulling away. And Stiles wonders how long it has been since he has been with someone like this; he wonders for exactly how long Derek has been alone, incredibly alone. And he slips his arm underneath the older man, loops it around his waist, muscles jumping underneath his touch like a pulse.  
  
“I’ll re-print them later,” he continues, squirming a bit before he is able to pry a sheet of paper off of his back, crumbled and nearly illegible as a whole, anyway, and he tosses it to the side. “‘Later’ being whenever I remember how to move my legs.”  
  
“Why are you even helping me?” whispers Derek. And the question throws him for all of five seconds; he thinks. Stiles does not really know, for certain,  _why_  exactly he is helping Derek. He does not know why the thought of something like an Alpha pack is so absolutely terrifying to him—or perhaps he does.  
  
Perhaps he knows that something like a pack of Alpha werewolves will probably equate to death for a lot of people, people that he cares about. Because there will be death, he has understood that. There will always be death. He wants to stop that. He needs to stop that. And perhaps he knows that the only way to even remotely have a chance in Hell is to be ready, to know, to have a modicum of an idea as to how to beat them. Perhaps he already knows what will happen, already tastes the blood on his tongue and the powder of mashed teeth at his gums, already knows what it is like to have your bones taken away from you, your body used against you—and the flashback of the warehouse and Scott telling Stiles about what had happened, about the use of Derek’s own body without his permission, brings Stiles’ stomach to his throat, in knots—and he already knows how this is going to end.  
  
Bloodshed.  
  
And Stiles is silent in his response, words unable to convey what he comprehends, understands, knows, for the first time in his short life, and he can only press the pads of his fingers to the underside of Derek’s jaw. He coaxes him up, gives him a small, tired smile that may be too old for his face; it still plays on his lips, though, like a marionette hangs from its own strings, limp and lifeless until the puppeteer makes it so.  
  
He kisses him on the mouth, soundly but briefly.  
  
Then Derek is pressing back like the contact is the only thing worth knowing anymore, pushing himself up on strong, thick arms, and hovering over the boy once more. The room is sticky, their bodies are heavy, and Stiles knows that the both of them are clueless, lifeless, but he still wraps lightly muscled arms around his neck and reels him in.  
  
Because things are hazy like a photo in an old book fades, but, much like the picture, it is still there. And he, at least, can still pretend.  
  


-

  
It goes on like this for weeks.  
  
They lounge in Stiles’ bed to forget, nude and hiding above the covers from the early summer winds that float through the open window and into the boy’s bedroom, barely noticeable as they speak in hushed tones and words murmured against clammy flesh. They speak of the Hunters and how they might need to ask for their help, they speak of possible motives, they speak of vague, stupid, nonsensical tales of Stiles’ childhood, small tidbits of Derek’s. Stiles’ cheeks are hollowed, eyes crescent moons when he smiles and laughs, tells a joke in an attempt to get anything out of Derek, a true quirk of the lips—and whenever he gets it, he knows that the other man can hear the stutter of his heartbeat, its rabbited quickening. He listens to the rustle of greened leaves blooming in the trees, listens to the rumble of Derek’s voice when he answers a question, replies to a thought; the boy’s head is on his chest, wide and warm, ear over his heartbeat because it is constant, something akin to a lone drum, incessant and forever.  
  
Forever.  
  
“Labor Day,” mumbles Stiles, turning to mouth sideways at his skin, to his sternum, where he nips and sucks a mark that will not last any longer than a few seconds, but he knows that Derek will still feel it. He wonders if he presses his fingers to the spots when he is alone, like Stiles does—remembers phantom teeth and ghostly tongues, remembers sweat-soaked sheets and muted whimpers. “Let’s keep this up until Labor Day.”  
  
It cannot last forever.  
  
And Derek is silent for a long time after that. When Stiles glances up at him, he is staring at his ceiling, maybe counting the markings of old posters there, viewing afterthoughts of things that have passed, things that have yet to come. He licks Derek’s chest, peppers kisses upwards like he has seen the other man do to him, moves up to Derek’s ear; he presses his lips to the shell of his ear. “Is that okay?”  _Is this okay?_  “I’ll have school and you’re still looking for Erica and Boyd, so—”  
  
Derek nods, jerkily, a solitary motion, and he worries his bottom lip before turning into Stiles’ space and pressing his mouth to the corner of Stiles’. “Yeah,” he says, not pulling away. “Yeah, it’s fine.”  
  
“I’m thinking of growing my hair out,” he blurts; Stiles leans into him, regardless, eyelids fluttering like shutters over a window. His eyelashes brush over his cheekbones, spider legs that crawl over him, venomous and threatened and gone in a flash of lightning in a summer storm. He kisses him fully, long fingers grasping the side of Derek’s face.  
  
“Why’s that?” he asks, and they are safe from destroying any papers tonight: they are all organized in a binder on Stiles’ desk. The bedclothes, however, are messy and unmade, tugged up from under the mattress to dance along the floor, shielding the monsters underneath them from the light. Derek pulls Stiles on top of him; the long lines of his thighs slot perfectly alongside Derek’s frame, and for a moment, the boy can appreciate it before he is being swallowed up again.  
  
“To give you something to hold on to,” is his eventual answer.  
  
Derek chuckles and Stiles counts it as a win.  
  


-

  
In July, Derek holds on to Stiles’ hair and Stiles nearly asks if he has held on to anything else in the time since the fire burned everything he could ever call his, but he holds his tongue.  
  
Instead, Stiles is pressed up against oak trees and kissed in the early morning, mouth toothpaste sharp and black coffee bitter, caffeine a dull thrum coursing through him like blood trickles from his mouth at the swift bite to the skin there, and the boy grips the front of Derek’s tank top and hauls him closer until their fronts are slotted together, utterly unified, continuous, without an end at all. Their jog has left them sweaty and panting and exhausted, but Stiles is still exhilarated through it all.  
  
His legs tremble and there is a knot in the trunk of the tree that paints bruises into his back, tank top clinging to his frame as he moves and flips their positions and Stiles is only one boy, seventeen as of a few months ago, but he still slips his hands up and under Derek’s shirt, palms singing the body electric as they drag over his nipples. They are animals, part of nature, and in the forest, no one hears them. Stiles drops to his knees and stains the knobs with grass and dirt, roots leaving imprints within them.  
  
He hooks his fingers along the elastic waistband of his shorts, of his boxers, and tugs. They pool around the other man’s ankles; the muscles in his thighs are shocks beneath light touches.  
  
The pitter-patter of Derek’s heartbeat is the soundtrack to their summer.  
  


-

  
He produces cheap beer from seemingly nowhere in the middle of a particularly trying week. Derek tells him that he cannot get drunk, but Stiles just shakes his head, a grimace on his face as he replies, “This stuff won’t get anyone drunk.” Derek yields to that with a minute shrug and simply watches as Stiles hoists himself up onto the back of the Camaro. There are clouds rolling in; they have been watching them for the past hour, silent and without much thought crackling between them.  
  
His index finger and his thumb encircle the throat of the bottle as he takes a swig, though, and Stiles catches the way Derek watches his Adam’s apple bobs against his neck, and he smirks. “Like what you see?” he asks quietly, without a slur. The sour taste of two dollar beer ferments on his tongue.  
  
Derek only hums, noncommittal, to which Stiles scoffs. And then Derek is crowding around him, hips stopping only at the bumper of his car, and even then he is leaning up to lick into the boy’s mouth, tongue just as sour, sliding along Stiles’ and it is almost filthier and dirtier than their other kisses of this category: it is unhurried, deep, teasing, a feather sweeping over his sides, eliciting a reaction, and Stiles drops the half-empty bottle to the ground. His hands come up to frame Derek’s face, but it is only then that the other pulls away, licking his lips.  
  
“Yes, I do,” he answers, vowels clipped, lungs gasping for air.  
  
And Stiles is struck dumb for a moment before he is pushing Derek away with blank, glazed eyes, and he wonders what lust smells like. He wonders if it is a sweet, nectar sort of thing, or if it is perhaps very spicy, all cinnamon and pepper and dragon’s breath; he wonders if it emanates from his very pores, if it wafts about his gaze like a ghost, like a breeze, hovering and clouding and blinding him from everything that is not Derek.  
  
He hops off the car, urges Derek to move down to the ground, lying back as he scrunches Derek’s shirt up, lets it form a ring around his chest. The earth is dusty and thirsts for water that has yet to come—a drought that is bound to end within the hour. The clouds are dark; they appear as though they ready to drown the world beneath them. Stiles takes the slowly emptying bottle from the place where it had fallen, smirk widening upon finding that it is still a little full; he meets Derek’s questioning look with a laugh.  
  
“I’ve always wanted to try this,” he says. Stiles holds the bottle over Derek’s navel, lets a droplet fall into the dip there; he covers it with his tongue, humming. “Tell me to stop?”  
  
Derek does no such thing.  
  
His eyes close, head lolling backwards as Stiles pours a bit more over his belly button, and Derek groans ever so slightly as his tongue curls around it, procuring every single drop of beer. He tastes sweat and alcohol, sour and tangy, overloading his taste buds, and Stiles nips at his hipbone, tugging lightly at taut skin. Derek’s mouth hangs open. Stiles laves his way up to Derek’s neck.  
  
The hollow of his throat is much like the hollow of the other man’s cheeks: they are shallow and sharp like a knife wound, and Stiles is straddling his waist in order to get closer, to breathe in the sun-kissed scent that lays dormant and strong in the crook of his neck. “Does it feel good?” he mumbles.  
  
“Y-yeah,” stammers Derek, shuddering under him as he pours a little bit of beer onto his throat; Stiles watches it pool there, a small trickle edging off the side of his neck, and the boy chases it with a flash of the pink of his tongue. He smiles when Derek gasps, drinks in the beer and the soft moans that permeate absolutely everything that they have built up.  
  
Derek is a flood. Stiles breaks down the dam that had been holding him in, and he sets the beer bottle down in favor of sucking a mark into his flesh. It melts away just as quickly as it comes, and Stiles moves up to bite at his ear lobe, to mouth at the skin beneath it. “Do you want me to touch you, Derek?” he asks, soft.  
  
He always asks. Derek always says yes.  
  


-

  
In August, it becomes more desperate.  
  
Time is against them, and Erica and Boyd have yet to be found. They spend nights in Stiles’ bed, days in Derek’s new loft, barely decorated and furnished, but still more than Stiles has ever seen him own. (He had helped him drag the couch in from the curb, bought a sheet for him to put over it.) It becomes furtive moments in the back of the Jeep, in the front of the Camaro, parked near the woods or on the side of an abandoned road, stolen instances of hands wrapped around each other, tugging them over the edge. It becomes desperate mouths against hungrier ones, curling fingers and broken toes. It becomes backs against the wall, against tree trunks, against car hoods.  
  
The month winds down and Stiles notices the looks Derek gives him. They spend less time together: instead of every day and all night, it is every few days, one night, and it is still a frantic, nearly pathetic thing when they do meet. They do not want to feel. This is the collective consensus where resignation takes over their default expressions, and Derek does not stop looking at him with pale eyes that have seen fire and death more times than Stiles can really count.  
  
There is something else, though, that is right there. He cannot really put a name to it.  
  
Or, maybe, he is just scared of what that name will be.  
  
Nonetheless, Stiles kisses Derek with more fervor than before, more akin to how they had begun: with an almost violent crash that elicits hisses from the both of them. There is nothing slow about this anymore: it is all a race, all a need and a want and Stiles will give as much as Derek desires, will take as much as Derek offers. They are animals. The nights are still sticky, but they grow colder as summer wanes like the moon grows newer, blacker, darker, and there is a sliver of silver left in the sky when he finally pulls away.  
  
Stiles never wipes his mouth. He only licks his lips, grasping for a modicum of air that just does not seem to want to reach his lungs, chasing the taste of peppermint toothpaste and bitter, black coffee and something sweet that is so purely Derek Hale that he cannot really  _help_  it. But he still finds himself being hauled back in, close, almost manhandled in the way Derek pulls him close and then forces him back, up against the wall with his fists in the front of Stiles’ shirt.  
  
Derek kisses him in a way that is begging him to stay.  
  
Stiles will, he thinks. He  _will_  stay here, he  _will_  press into Derek as Derek presses into him, as Derek bites red-warm bruises into his jaw, neck, collarbones, he  _will_. (Until Labor Day.)  
  


-

  
They spend a week apart. Barely.  
  
School starts on a Thursday, and Stiles finds that his life is more akin to a Hitchcock movie than anything else. He throws himself over Lydia because she is the closest, Allison two desks away and Scott safely out of the school altogether, and the crows’ beaks peck at his temple with alarming speed, as though his brain is a worm in the rain-softened earth, ripe for the picking. He bleeds. He will always bleed, always, and he has resigned himself to that fate, regardless of how much it may irk him, may scare him, annoy him to no end.  
  
He is not a hero.  
  


-

  
They spend a week apart. Barely.  
  
Stiles sees him in the dilapidated remains of his old life, and Derek almost seems smaller. Nature has started taking back what was once its own, eating away at rotten wood with vines and roots for teeth. Wolfsbane grows through the floorboards, leaves accentuating the sound of every step with a resounding crunch. Isaac is unconscious on a table in the same room they are in, covered by a sheet; his breaths are silent, but his chest moves, and Stiles stands off to the side, arms crossed over his chest, as Scott explains his tattoo in quiet words, averted eyes.  
  
But Derek glances at him, from time to time, illuminated by the sunlight that trickles in through the broken ceiling, crumbling and deteriorating, slanting in the space that it is granted, around the trees that have sprouted and begun to grow. And after the tattoo, the  _mark_ , is complete and Derek has set the blowtorch down, Scott having passed out with Stiles’ hands squeezing his shoulders tight, Derek stands and moves to check on Isaac.  
  
His touch is gentle upon the Beta; he brushes a curl away from his forehead, breathes in like he is tasting his scent.  
  
And Stiles watches, because the look that Derek gives Isaac is not the same one that is given to the human boy. Derek’s eyes meet his as that thought crosses his mind, and his expression is that default one of exhausted resignation to one’s fate: to death, to death, to death, and Stiles has viewed this before on what feels like a silver screen now.  
  
He has seen it in a hospital bed, on a skeletal face that has been killed and reanimated by chemotherapy and time. Hair that had once been down to her waist, falling in curling waterfalls over her shoulders when it was not tied up, low at the base of her skull, had turned wispy, begun to fall out and collect in her pillows. Her arms no longer had veins, only tubes, IVs hooked into hands, oxygen hoses into her nostrils, but her grip on his hand had never wavered.  
  
He had squeezed, interwoven their fingers together, gazed at her exhausted face.  
  
She had had an expression of resignation, quiet and surreal, tugging at her very flesh; like a fish caught on a hook, reeled in by the fisherman, she was being pulled in multiple different directions. No longer did she smell of nutmeg and bluebells, but of only death and antibacterial sprays and hospitals. There had been dullness in her eyes, an acceptance that she would be dying soon—she had had no more fight in her.  
  
But she had still loved him.  
  
Even without the fight in her, she had loved him with every square inch of her very  _being_. She had loved his father with her entire  _soul_. She had whispered  _I love you_ s every night from her place in the hospital bed, let him climb up to give her a kiss on the cheek, a hug with thin arms around her neck, and that look of quiet, deadly resignation had been mirrored by one of love.  
  
Stiles is looking back at that same  _look_  again.  
  
And the world is reclaiming the debauchery that the fire had committed, slowly but steadily, all around them, and the boy steps forward just as the man does, and they meet in the middle. Stiles’ heartbeat is more than the pitter-patter of Derek’s in his chest, drumming quickly, like a rabbit, against his ribcage until there is nothing but a quick thrum of energy, of blood coursing through him. He rests a hand on Derek’s cheek, the pad of his thumb sweeping over the expanse of skin that lay beneath it; he smiles when Derek leans into it.  
  
He does not say  _I missed you_. He leans forward and kisses it into Derek’s mouth, closed and chaste and then open and wet, and they both shudder as their arms slide around the other in a synchronized movement. He does not say  _I will not leave_  because that would be a lie, for the both of them must leave one day.  
  
Derek says goodbye in a way that is bittersweet, like coffee and candy canes. His hands grip the back of Stiles’ shirt, flannel well-worn, until the boy is finally backed up against the wall, and then his grip finds its place upon each of Stiles’ hips, dipping under his shirt and diving into the warmth that his body offers.  
  
Derek says goodbye through kisses that exponentially deepen and then bruise. Stiles knows that he knows that he will die and it only makes him kiss Derek harder, swallowing every pathetic whimper and desperate plea that threatens to spill over his tongue. He breathes out, harsh, through his nostrils, as Derek brings up sweaty palms to card through the boy’s hair.  
  
Their bodies are one until they draw away.  
  
Derek bites his tongue and the words are red against Stiles’ vision. He cannot see another person leave. He cannot be the next person to leave. And the boy pulls Derek close again, kisses him sweeter and swifter, fingers closing over his wrist; he squeezes. Derek rests his own hand over Stiles’, squeezes back.  
  
Scott stirs and they move apart. The ghost of Derek’s hand on his, however, remains.  
  


-

  
Stiles arrives at Derek’s loft a handful of hours after Scott’s bicep meets a blowtorch, rain soaked and shivering as the sky had opened up and poured down upon the world, with his tongue upside down in his mouth and his heart stuck in his throat. His stomach does somersaults and skips rope with his intestines, but he still finds himself stepping into the main room of the loft, where Derek’s bed and his couch and his table are, where his kitchenette is, off to the side—and where Derek is, sitting on the couch with the white sheet pulled over it, just as Stiles had tucked it in.  
  
He holds his head in his hands and seems to be squeezing, fingers clutching at his hair with a vice grip. Derek’s shoulders tremble as if there is something pent up, and Stiles knows that there is, and the man had to have heard his Jeep over the torrential downpour, had to have smelled him the moment he had stepped into the building, but he does not react. And Stiles toes off his shoes in the middle of the room before he climbs onto the couch beside him, cushions sinking dangerously low as he kneels.  
  
Stiles’ hand slides over Derek’s shoulder, moves up to his scalp, where he gently coaxes Derek’s hands to relax their grip, to come down to lay upon his thighs. The boy brushes his nose over Derek’s temple, lets him lean into a thin frame; Stiles wraps one arm around him, free hand carding through his hair.  
  
“I can’t leave yet,” the man breathes, shuddering and cold into Stiles’ neck, words hot against damp skin. “I’m trying. I can’t.”  
  
“Neither can I,” answers Stiles. He turns his head to mouth at whatever part of Derek’s face he can reach. He does not say  _Thank God, please stay, I cannot watch someone else go_  because Derek is pulling back to look at him with the same expression his mother once wore, and words fail him again. Derek’s hands slip up to hold his face; their foreheads knock together.  
  
And when they kiss, Stiles tastes blood and bittersweet things on his tongue.


End file.
